Tag: Saints’ Days

Lutherans don’t do “Saints” with quite the same vigor that Catholics do, we just have a few people who were a little crazy about Church. So this is a little bit of a downer way to finish up the project. Some nice hymns, though.

Definition of Cameronian
One that holds the ecclesiastical and political doctrines of Richard Cameron and his followers who refused to recognize any civil government that did not explicitly admit that it derived its power from Jesus Christ, who were called Scottish Covenanters after 1680, and who later formed the Reformed Presbytery that in time became the Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Which, I guess, IS interesting, since the 45th President of the United States self-identifies himself as, “Presbyterian”.

Anyway, it is a pleasant, and somewhat Martial hymn, whose folk roots are quite apparent.

Boy, I’m starting to get psyched! I’m almost done with the Church Year. Only two more songs to go after this one!

I started this project in March of 2016, (with “Hark! A Thrilling Voice is Sounding“,) nominally with the goal of getting through the songs of the Church Year. It did take a bit more than a year, but what can you do. But, boy, my clarinet playing and recording has come a long way in that year.

It has been a super helpful exercise.

After finishing with the Church Year, I’ll probably take a break from hymns. Maybe try a bit more arranging. So expect fewer updates, as that will be more work.

This is a pretty typical Edmund White take on a Latin chant. In a lot of ways, these hymns are the most challenging in the book. The parts are far less symmetrical than most modern hymns.

This is actually a pretty fun arrangement with counter movement in both the bass and tenor parts.

I don’t know that it is a particularly well known hymn melody, it is only used for this hymn that I can tell, and I can only find the information from the hymnal about it, that it is a, “Norwegian Folk Melody”. Not knowing enough about Norwegian Folk Melodies, I can’t tell you more than that.

Without more information, I am going to guess that this song might be named after Hans Nielsen Hauge, based on the following:

Hans Nielsen Hauge (3 April 1771 – 29 March 1824) was a 19th-century Norwegian Lutheran lay minister, spiritual leader and author. He led a noted Pietism revival known as the Haugean movement. Hauge is also considered to have been influential in the early industrialization of Norway.[2][3]

He had a poor and otherwise ordinary youth until 5 April 1796, when he received his “spiritual baptism” in a field near his farm. Within two months, he had founded a revival movement in his own community, written a book, and decided to take his mission on the road. He wrote a series of books in his lifetime. In a total of 18 years, he published 33 books. Estimates are that 100,000 Norwegians read one or more of them, at a time when the population was 900,000 more-or-less literate individuals.[4]

In the next several years, Hauge traveled – mostly by foot – throughout most of Norway, from Tromsø in the north to Norway in the south. He held countless revival meetings, often after church services. In addition to his religious work, he offered practical advice, encouraging such things as settlements in Northern Norway. He and his followers were persecuted, though their teachings were in keeping with Lutheran doctrine. He began preaching about “the living faith” in Norway and Denmark after a mystical experience that he believed called him to share the assurance of salvation with others. At the time, itinerant preaching and religious gatherings held without the supervision of a pastor were illegal, and Hauge was arrested several times.

Hauge faced great personal suffering and state persecution. He was imprisoned no less than 14 times between 1794 and 1811, accused of witchcraft and adultery, and of violating the Conventicle act of 1741[6] (at the time, Norwegians did not have the right of religious assembly without a Church of Norway minister present). His time in prison broke his health and led to his premature death. Upon his release from prison in 1811, he took up work as a farmer and industrialist at Bakkehaugen near Christiania (now Oslo).[7][8]

In 1815, he married Andrea Andersdatter, who later died in childbirth that same year. In 1817, he married Ingeborg Marie Olsdatter (1791-1872) and bought the Bredtvet farm (now the site of Bredtvet Church in Oslo) where he died. Three of his four children died in infancy. His surviving son, Andreas Hauge, became a priest in the Church of Norway and Member of the Norwegian Parliament.[9]

Moreover, the name Hauge seemed familiar to me, as in “Hauge Church”, from when I was growing up in Wisconsin.

Notes: Also known as Hauge Lutheran Old Church. Before 1850 the pioneers of Perry Township had no way of liturgical worship.. In 1850 the congregation relied on circuit preachers. On March 28, 1851, the first formal Norwegian worship was held. The congregation decided to build a 20’ x 20’ building. The building was comprised of logs and constructed in 1852.
During its early years dissension grew among the members over the form their worship should take. Those who were interested in change to a less formalized service before they left Norway and were followers of the Haugean Movement and those who wanted the formal “high-church” style of the state church of Norway. At a meeting held in November of 1854, the faction loyal to the State Church of Norway voted to form its own congregation. The settlers who chose to remain with the 1852 congregation affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and later became known as the Hauge Congregation. In 1927 the original 1852 church building was restored. The church is on the National Register of Historic Places.

I thought, for sure, with a name like “Laurentius laurentii Laurinus” there would be something about this guy. But this is it. He was a Swedish Rector, Dean, and poet.

In any case, it is a nice hymn!

Short Name: Laurentius Laurentii Laurinus
Full Name: Laurinus, Laurentius Laurentii, 1573-1655
Birth Year: 1573
Death Year: 1655
Laurinus became a principal in Söderköping, Sweden, in 1603, and in 1609, a rector in Haradshammar in Linköping diocese, Östergötland, later a dean. But he was known as a poet in the Swedish, German and Latin languages.

Especially unusual, for a Lutheran Hymn, in that it is 5/4, an “uneven” meter more common in folk music. On the other hand, not all that surprising considering the following information about the composer. (The following was translated from the Finnish language wikipedia.)

Already in his studies, Nyberg collected folk tales from Southwest and Central Finland.He composed, in particular, spiritual solo and choir songs, school and children’s songs, singers and beggars in the choir book of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church .[2] The current hymnbook contains Nyberg’s hymn number 631, Oi Lord, if I travel a country .He has also written a script 342, so wonderful is the praise, the original Swedish-language words, spoken by Alpo Noponen in Finnish.In addition, Nyberg has translated some other, original Swedish-language hymns [3] Nyberg published in 1890 a collection of spiritual folk tales ( The People’s Gift to the Church ) together with Ilmari Krohn.

This is another rather harmonically modern hymn arrangement. Very close, almost dissonant harmonies, with an unusually lingering resolution.

Considering it’s composer seems to have been rather fond of Wagner, I guess this isn’t a surprise.

Short Name: Joseph Barnby
Full Name: Barnby, Joseph, 1838-1896
Birth Year: 1838
Death Year: 1896
Barnby was a composer, conductor and (like his father Thomas Barnby) an organist. He entered the choir of York Minster at age seven, and was an organist and choirmaster at twelve. In 1854 he went to London and entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied under Cipriani Potter and Charles Lucas. In 1856, he competed for the first Mendelssohn Scholarship. When the examinations were over, of the nineteen applicants, he was tied for first place with Arthur Sullivan. After a second test, Sullivan won.

Barnby was organist at Mitcham, St. Michael’s, Queenhithe, and St. James’ the Less, Westminster, before he was appointed to St. Andrew’s, Wells Street, where he remained from 1863 to 1871, establishing the musical reputation of the services. From 1871 to 1886 he was organist of St. Anne’s, Soho, where he instituted the annual performances of Bach’s Passion Music according to St. John, with orchestral accompaniment. In 1867, Messrs. Novello, to whom he had been musical adviser since 1861, established Barnby’s Choir, which gave oratorio concerts from 1869 to 1872, when it was amalgamated with the choir formed and conducted by M. Gounod at the Royal Albert Hall, under the title of the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society (now the Royal Choral Society). The same publishing firm also gave daily concerts in the Albert Hall, 1874-75, which Barnby orchestrated.

Barnby conducted the St. Matthew Passion in Westminster Abbey in 1871. He was appointed precentor of Eton in 1875, a post he kept until 1892, when he succeeded Thomas Weist-Hill as principal of the Guildhall School of Music.

In 1878, Barnby married Edith Mary Silverthorne. Also that year, he helped found the London Musical Society, becoming its first director and conductor. Under his baton, the Society produced Dvorak’s Stabat Mater for the first time in England.

In 1884, Barnby conducted the first performance in England of Wagner’s Parsifal as a concert in the Albert Hall. From 1886-8 he conducted rehearsals and concerts of the Royal Academy of Music, of which he was a fellow.

Barnby was knighted in 1892, and in the same year conducted the Cardiff Festival. He conducted the festival again in 1895.

Barnby’s compositions include an oratorio (Rebekah, 1870), a psalm (The Lord Is King, Leeds Festival, 1893), an enormous number of services and anthems, part songs and vocal solo, trios, etc. He also wrote a series of Eton Songs, 246 hymn tunes (published in one volume in 1897), and edited five hymnals, the most important of which was The Hymnary (1872).

This one is written with the congregation singing in unison for the first section, while the organ plays parts, and the second part with the congregation singing parts. So I couldn’t resist doing something similar. I changed the arrangement up a bit to be unison parts with organ, a capella parts, and then a return to unison with organ accompaniment.

I wrote out the organ parts and exported a midi file for them. Imported it into garageband, and then recorded the clarinet parts.

Here’s a short biography of R. Vaughn Williams from the Ralph Vaughn Williams Society Webpage.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is today fully established as a composer of the utmost importance for English music. In a long and extensive career, he composed music notable for its power, nobility and expressiveness, representing the essence of ‘Englishness’.

Vaughan Williams was born on the 12th October, 1872 in the Cotswold village of Down Ampney. He was educated at Charterhouse School, then Trinity College, Cambridge. Later he was a pupil of Stanford and Parry at the Royal College of Music, after which he studied with Max Bruch in Berlin and Maurice Ravel in Paris.

At the turn of the century he was among the very first to travel into the countryside to collect folk-songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations to enjoy. As musical editor of The English Hymnal he composed several hymns that are now world-wide favourites (For all the Saints, Come down O love Divine). Later he also helped to edit The Oxford Book of Carols, with similar success. Before the war he had met and then sustained a long and deep friendship with the composer Gustav Holst. Vaughan Williams volunteered to serve in the Field Ambulance Service in Flanders for the 1914-1918 war, during which he was deeply affected by the carnage and the loss of close friends such as the composer George Butterworth.

For many years Vaughan Williams conducted and led the Leith Hill Music Festival, conducting Bach’s St Matthew Passion on a regular basis. He also became professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in London. In his lifetime, Vaughan Williams eschewed all honours with the exception of the Order of Merit which was conferred upon him in 1938.

He died on the 26th August 1958; his ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near Purcell. In a long and productive life, music flowed from his creative pen in profusion. Hardly a musical genre was untouched or failed to be enriched by his work, which included nine symphonies, five operas, film music, ballet and stage music, several song cycles, church music and works for chorus and orchestra.

The harmony on the third stanza of this one is so close for a hymn, I had to go back and double check my work several times. But, yes, that is the way it is written in the hymnal. Don’t know what to tell you. I guess James Langran was a little odd for his time. Either that or it’s typos.

A pupil of John Calkin, Langran was tutored as organist at St. James’s Church, Edmonton (London). He then served as organist at St. Michael’s, Wood Green (June 1856); Holy Trinity, Tottenham (1859); Parish Church, All Hallows, Tottenham (1870); and St. Paul’s, Tottenham (1870-1909). He was also Instructor to the Training College for Schoolmistresses, Tottenham, from its foundation around 1880, and received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oxford in 1884.